Hi, my name is Honey Bee and I’m a coffee-aholic.
I don’t get the worldwide fascination with coffee. I mean no arguments here, I need my giant cup of Caribou every morning (Amy’s Blend is the coffee de jour) with a little bit of Splenda please, no the BIG cup please, thank you honey. But of so many drinks out there, coffee is pretty much a standard in the Western world, no matter where exactly you’re at. In such a diverse world, that impresses me.
I was in Venezuela in college, and they have coffee that was hella strong, but had the best flavor of any coffee I’ve ever had. I don’t really even remember what flavor precisely, just that I loved it and haven’t tasted anything like it, before or since. There’s the college dorm industrial coffeemaker that stained the side of the styrofoam cups. That was jet fuel coffee, half a cup and I was more animated than a chipmunk on crack. And of course work coffee, from the giant Bunn coffemakers that look like they’re older than some of the employees. That’s like the housewives of coffee- plain, not fancy, but gets the job done.
Wikipedia calls caffeine psychoactive stimulant drug. My DOD (Dear Old Dad) treats caffeine like a drug (although probably not just because Wikipedia says so). DOD says its a legal addictive stimulant and should be sold only to people over 18. When I see my ten-year-old nephew down a Mountain Dew, I’m inclined to agree. Caffeine didn’t really affect me during the teenage and college years, probably when I most needed it for late study sessions. But it’s making up for it now! I drank two diet Dr. Pepper’s and a Coke at 8pm the other night. I was wide awake enough to regret it at 3am. But thankfully, I had coffee waiting for me on the other side, to help me navigate the complexities of getting dressed and going to work. No promises on work quality though.
I used diet Dr. Pepper and NyQuil as my uppers and downers, working a day/night rotation as a nurse on a stepdown unit. I would get heart palpitations that would make me slightly dizzy for a second, and then pass. One time when I’d had three DDP’s, my heart was going crazy and co-workers hooked me up to a portable monitor to see what it looked like. Ten minutes later the charge nurse came around the corner, “Who is in 776B?” Apparently I was having some pretty impressive PVC’s that set off the alarms in the main nurses station!
I knew I’d become a grown-up when I skipped coffee one day, and didn’t really function. Like at all. Dear Marmot brings me a cup every morning, for which I am eternally grateful. And I’m pretty sure my fellow employees are too, because I arrive in my office at 7am and we all need that coffee buffer between us and my sweet non-morning-personality.
Now they say that if you actually knew what you were eating all the time, you wouldn’t eat anything. And I agree with that, but I will never ever (knowingly) drink something made from beans that have been pooped by an animal.
And that’s what I’m thinking about today.
I’m really proud that it turned out so well, based on my history! This is actually the second time I’ve tried Mrs. Louise’s recipe, the first time was a little bit (ok, a lot) of a disaster. I made it for Christmas Day last year and had high hopes, but a stick of Crisco is twice as big as a stick of butter but I didn’t happen to notice that. When it came out, Will asked me if a pie was supposed to be that ’squishy’?
follow the b.